This late
thereís little to see
but the fading trail,
its sharp drop in to the river canyon
no more than a feeling, going down
a thousand feet of switchbacks,
sure of nothing
but water forever
carving the chasm floor.

Thereís a sense of peace
felt nowhere else
but in this
dark descent,
mind dead to the invisible world,
breath hollow,
automatic as a pulse,
boot after boot
plodding down the pillowed dust.

Below,
in that other
time and place,
the trout Iíve come for
cruise deep pools
under mountain shards,
fanning the isinglass
bottom of night.

In the morning
when they rise,
a school of scattered prayers
flaming from the rocks,
I will kneel in the gravel
with my first fish from the river,
as unselfconsciously alive
as the piscine dreams of God.

Your friend spends a week up in Canada,
comes back with epic tales of trophy fish,
but midway through a monster northern saga
he loses you to this image from the past:
her tackle a cane pole, her bait a red worm,
an old woman lifts a sliver of brilliance
off the mud bottom of an old stock dam,
out of tepid shallows, through a rug of moss;
her thin line shimmering, a strand of light,
she lands her catch beside a 4-year-old
who laughs, drops to his knees in the dirt
and reaches for that slick, cold shock of gold,
a thing so alive an electric shiver
shakes him at the core and leaves this scar.